On clause-internally moved wh-phrases : wh-to-foc, nominative clitics, and the theory of Northern Italian wh-in situ

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the seemingly-optional alternation between wh-in situ and wh-ex situ in the Romance languages of Northern Italy, and is crucially based on novel data from Trevigiano, a Venetan dialect. Indeed, Trevisian clause-internal wh-phrases display an interesting movement pattern which I analyse as an instance of focus-movement into Belletti’s (2004) Foc, i.e. within the periphery of vP. My main claim is that the availability of a clause-internal focal projection for both new information and contrastive focus in Trevigiano pushes a treatment of clause-internally moved wh-phrases as subject to movement triggered by the EPP in T, under Focus-Agreement. This analysis is firmly anchored on two assumptions: first, that Cable’s (2010) 'grammar of Q' ought to be extended also to languages with silent Q-particles; second, that the simultaneous existence of two semantically-related structures within the same grammar (in this case, wh-in situ and wh-ex situ) functions as an indicator of an intermediate stage in the process of linguistic evolution. On these assumptions, I argue that Northern Italian wh-in situ is better understood if Northern Italian dialects are assumed to have both Q-projection and Q-adjunction, with micro-variations explained in terms of different stages in the evolution towards generalised Q-adjunction, presence or absence of movement-triggering tools (such as the EPP), or special prosodic constraints. My analysis of wh-in situ as an instance of low focus movement, which is supported by robust data from non-Romance languages (Jayaseelan 1996, Kahnemuyipour 2001, Aboh 2007, Manetta 2010, a.o.), also has interesting theoretical consequences for the theory of Northern Italian insituness, which I outline briefly in the form of a primitive typology of wh-in situ.